166 
FOREST^ AND STREAM. 
[Feb. 28, 1903. 
I ever witnessed was done by a spoftstttan who shot 
seven birds successively without a miss. The cover was 
located on a hillside and consisted of a low growth of 
birches, blackberry bushes and a few small' scrub oaks 
and alders. The sportsman stood in one spot and the 
birds, when flushed, flew down the hillside toward a 
thick swamp at the bottom. Of course, it was an ex- 
ceptionally good position that he occupied and his shoot- 
ing was beyond compare, but even at that one cannot 
expect to see twice in a lifetime so many of these swift- 
flying birds fall to a single gun without a miss. 
The Little Blue Snow Bird. 
As we pass from the heavier timbered woods out into 
one of the open stretches which frequently occur in all 
our northern forest lands, we come upon a scattered 
flock of these lively, nervous little birds, the junco or 
blue snow bird. Busily engaged they always are, for the 
seeds of wild weeds and other plants upon which they 
subsist at this season of the year are not over-abundant, 
and to obtain enough food to support life they must al- 
ways be industrious. 
Notwithstanding that they do not in winter fare very 
si.mptuously, they are always bright and seemingly cheer- 
ful and contented. 
Their song is not at all presumptuous, consisting, as it 
does, of a twittering chirp similar to the sound that may 
be produced by striking together a couple of small peb- 
bles in the hand, but it is uttered frequently, and often 
by a half dozen birds at a time, and a flock of these little 
sparrows in consequence give a life and animation to our 
woods in winter that is excelled by no other species. 
They do not confine themselves to the woods, however, 
and we find them fluttering about the fields and pastures 
in the .search for food, and when the weather laecomes 
more rigorous they become so familiar that they visit 
the gardens and farm yards, where they share with the 
poultry the cracked corn and wheat screenings that may 
be thrown out to them. 
Although the snow bird is a northern species, it finds 
congenial conditions in high altitudes, nesting in the 
mountainous regions as far south as Virginia. T have 
met with specimens in the White Mountains in New 
Hampshire in the summer months, and have found its 
nests in the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts. In New 
Brunswick and Nova Scotia it is a common species in 
the summer, breeding freely about the farm houses and 
among the scattered settlements. It nests on the ground, 
but sometimes departs from this habit, for, according to 
Dr. Brewer, it has been observed in repeated instances 
to nidificate within outhouses. In a woodshed connected 
with a dwelling house he saw several nests built within 
reach of the hand, and in "places where the family were 
passing and repassing throughout the day." The nest of 
the little junco is often despoiled by a variety of depre- 
dators. In Nova Scotia I have frequently found its nest 
ill the grassy bank around a farm house, where only by 
the greatest of good fortune the eggs are hatched and 
the young are reared, for the domestic cat has no hesita- 
tion in rifling the neat little structure, the callow young 
of the snow birds constituting a welcome bonne bouche 
for the feline marauder. 
I was once quite interested in watching the growth of 
a nestful of these little birds, visiting it sometimes two 
or three times a day. The nest was built in the turf 
of the bank which surrounded the wood yard, and was 
not two rods from the door of the farm house at which 
I was stopping. Near the bank was an enormous pile 
of cordwood, beneath which I one day discovered that 
an enormous spotted adder had its home. It was the 
largest one of its Icinds that I had ever seen, and I tried 
in every possible way to capture it, but it had all the 
cunning that is attributed to the species, and it always 
escaped me. 
One morning as I was standing in the doorway I heard 
the twittering expostulations of the parent birds, and 
hastening to the nest I found that the young birds had 
disappeared, the last one probably being in the mouth 
of the adder that glided under the ,wood pile as I ap- 
proached. 
The birds .were well avenged a short time after; for 
by rare good fortune I caught the snake one day in the 
orchard a safe distance from his usual lurking place, and 
with a club I quickly put an end to his bird-destroying 
proclivities. 
The juncoes, like other ground nesters, also suffer 
from the depredations of marauding birds. On one occa- 
sion I found the nests of four pairs of this, species, all 
cf which contained young. They were built in the sides 
of an old abandoned lumber road which ran from, or to, 
the Magalloway River in Maine. I discovered them in 
the morning, and in the afternoon when I returned 
through the same path every nest was depopulated, and 
near by a pair of Canada jays were lurking in the trees, 
shouting defiance at us, while surrounding them were the 
afflicted snow birds, which were uttering their cries of 
complaint and sorrow. I emptied both barrels of my gun 
in the direction of the jays, and I think they have eaten 
no young birds since that time. 
Edward A. Samuels, 
(to be continued.) 
Migration. 
What is the total significance of the migratory in- 
stinct? 
If its manifestations were known to be confined to 
periodical and systematic movement, following the pro- 
cession of seasons or crops, there would be little to won- 
der about. But there is a migratory instinct which is 
manifested at but rare and irregular intervals. More- 
over, it is not confined to beasts and birds, but from time 
to time it actuates men and tribes of men. The Israelites 
were not all oppressed, since after they left Egypt many 
of them longed for its fieshpots ; but when one started 
the rest followed. The Crusaders were not all animated 
by perferyid religious zeal, the spirit of adventure, or 
other motives of sufficient strength to carry them across 
Europe; but the spirit seized them all and held them to 
the enterprise. And the children Crusaders were ani- 
mated by no motive whatever, and yet the spirit seized 
them and was stronger in them than in the grown peo- 
ple, since, when their parents sought to stop them, they 
drooped and died. And in the case of animals it has 
more than once been observed that irregular migrations 
were not occasioned by any natural circitmstance, such 
as famine or other calamity. I remember a very inter- 
esting article on the subject which appeared in Forest 
AND Stream some years ago, by a man who evidently 
had given considerable attention to it, and who described 
among other occurrences of like character a striking 
migration, upon a day certain, of the bears from the 
State of Maine. The story makes one think of the jour- 
ney in the wilderness. The same thought comes to me 
when I recall the story of the Gadites, which my step- 
mother told me a few years ago upon her return from a 
trip to Jerusalem, and which was told to her by mem- 
bers of the European colony there, missionaries, vision- 
aries, etc. 
It will be remembered by the Bible-reading Forest 
AND Stream family that the Gadites were a tribe of 
Israel who were carried into captivity by Tigloth-pileser 
II. into Assyria, some of them as far as beyond Nineveh, 
and to what is now the eastern boundary of Kurdestan, 
and were not heard from again. A short while before 
my parents were at Jerusalem, a remnant of the descend- 
ants of these very Gadites straggled back to Jerusalem, 
possibly over the trail their ancient ancestors had traveled 
2,750 years before, a journey of about a thousand miles. 
Their account ran that one day the men working in the 
fields, certain of them, felt the irresistible impulse to go 
back to Jerusalem. They went into the towns and found 
the same feeling existing there; and off they started, 
through the city, The poor girls could not stand that, 
and so gave up the practice. But suppose the impulse 
had been too strong for that or any other remedy. Sup- 
pose all the children again started off on a crusade, this 
time for Nova Zembla. And that they kept on. 
How was it with the wild pigeons? Does anyone be- 
lieve that they were all killed and eaten? Or that they 
were exterminated by disease, or holocaust, or ca,ta- 
clysm? The last place I heard of them, in any numbers, 
v.'as in Canada. Suppose the Voice called them away 
from the 32-at-one-shot creatures, and the netters, 
further and further into the frozen North. May they not 
have flown, gathered together in one old-time cloud, in 
all their pristine innocence and gentleness into the here- 
after — into the limbo of extinct species? 
George Kennedy. 
Crossbills at Work. 
In the low trees among which the crossoills spent their 
day it was possible to see at close quarters their method 
of dealing with the fir-cones and extracting the seed. 
Many of the cones had fallen and were lying on the 
ground. These the birds carefully searched for. Half- 
a-dozen, both red and green birds, would descend on to 
the bed of pine needles and inspect the cones. We da 
not remember to have read any account of crossbills 
working on the ground. They are less parrotlike than 
when in the branches, for they hop instead of creeping 
feeding the gulls, OSWEGO RIVER, OSWEGO, N. Y. 
those among them who were most influenced, without 
much provision for the journey, and, after a great many 
privations, those who survived and persisted came back 
"to their own land," as they expressed it, footsore and 
weary; just, I imagine, as Colonel Bobo's squirrels were 
footsore and weary when they had barkened to "the 
Voice" and accomplished their journey. And they were 
a queer lot of Jews, too, for the Gadites were warriors 
and shepherds and nomads from the beginning, and had 
so remained throughout, and had no trace of the typical 
mercantile countenance which has belonged to their 
brethren since the time of the crucifixion and before. 
They were workers, farmers, artisans, one being a stone 
m^ason. 
It is curious to observe that in considering the subject 
the mind contemplates men and animals indiscriminately, 
as tliough, as to this matter, there is no distinction worth 
v/hile the making. 
The question is, is this an extra or super-sense, or is it 
merely a sporadic throwing back to a rudimentary 
periodic migratory instinct? 
If it is bottomed on the periodic instinct, that which, 
at certain times, says "Go north" and, at certain times, 
"Go south," then it is a latent tendency (such, for in- 
stance, as is my tendency to kill, which breaks out under 
certain exciting conditions). And yet there are some 
manifestations of even that instinct, systematic though 
it be, which may seem to point to the existence of a 
sense above our perceptions and beyond our ken. Take 
the case of the seals. Each year a certain spot is ap- 
pointed, somehow, for their breeding ground, and from 
all over the Arctic Ocean the seals will be found moving 
toward that point. Sealers carefully observe the direc- 
tion in which they are traveling at a certain point and 
sail onward a number of miles and take another observa- 
tion, and where the two lines of direction converge, up 
there in the north, in due time will the seals and their 
breeding ground be found. 
Is there an annual seal congress which picks out the 
next breeding ground, and is the latitude and longitude 
thereof then sent around to the constituents by pelagic 
telepathy? 
Or is it that there is a sense we do not know about 
yet; for the most part inert, yet manifesting its power 
at either frequent and regular periods or at infrequent 
and irregular periods, according to the needs of life, of 
preservation, of species preservation? And that, some- 
times, this sense works the destruction of species? 
Once a mania, a perverted instinct, took possession 
of the virgins in Venice. They began committing 
suicide. There would soon have been none left but for 
the Doge, who issued the Draconian decree that there- 
after the bodies of all suicides were to be dragged naked 
like a parrot. But if a cone is searched where it lies, the 
bird throws one foot over it just as a parrot does, rests 
its breast across it, and thrusts its mandibles very delib- 
erately into the interstices, just like a parrot feeding. 
Often the bird picks up a cone in its beak and flies 
into a low branch of a pine to extract the seeds there. 
When feeding on the tree itself, the bird holds the cone 
firmly in one foot, trying not to detach it from the 
bough, and tries every side, sometimes hanging hpad 
downwards, sometimes tail downwards, and, if the cone 
becomes detached, keeping its grasp and fluttering down 
thiough the pine tufts till it can catch hold of one with 
its disengaged foot. This constant fluttering and falling 
would break stiffer and closer feathers than those of the 
crossbill. As it is, the looser ones give way, while the 
stiff tail and wing feathers do become ragged and broken. 
While the flock are at work the grove is quite silent ex- 
cept for the constant fluttering and the falling of the 
cones which they hive detached by accident or finished 
searching. So close were the birds that they could be 
seen "husking" the seeds when extracted, and it was no- 
ticed that their beaks showed various degrees of length 
and crossing of the mandible. In more than one the tips 
did not project beyond the depth of the other mandible, 
and it was only when the bird looked "full face" at its 
visitors that the crossing was visible. About one-six- 
teenth of an inch was the average overlap. 
The difficulty of extracting the seed by any other means 
than those provided by the peculiar bill of these birds 
must be very great. So tough and rigid are the louv 
of the cone that, unless they gape from ripeness, the sttd 
cannot be extracted without the greatest difficulty even 
with a strong knife. Beyond the fortification of these 
rigid louvres of wood, the seed itself lies in a special little 
socket, in the very core of the cone. According to Yar- 
rell, the bird first opens its beak until the points do not 
cross, this being possible because the mandibles have 
some lateral play. It then pushes this in like a wedge, 
wrenches the mandibles crosswise again, and so prying 
open the crack, extracts the seed. The seed itself lies at 
the base of a little wing, like that of a small dragon-fly, 
and the birds manage to extract this without breaking it, 
or the light husk which envelops the kernel. They could 
be seen "husldng" this, and pushing the "wing" and the 
husk out of their mouths with their tongues, just as a 
parrot does. The kernel, when extracted, is no larger 
than a mustard seed, and tastes like a morsel of Brazil 
nut flavored with turpentine. The crossbills evidently 
consider it very delicious, and would not taste buckwheat 
seeds, which were inserted into cones as an experiment 
The resinous dainty had more attention than the peaches 
ripening in numbers on walls close by. — London Spec- 
tator, 
